News of Osama bin Laden’s death brought as much sorrow as satisfaction to two Colorado Springs families who each lost a daughter in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Lowell and Pat Bell were watching a tennis match in their Black Forest home Sunday when the news broke in, and their thoughts turned to  daughter Nina, who died in the north tower of the World Trade Center.

Gene Yancey’s first thoughts, too, were of his daughter, Kathryn Yancey LaBorie. She was the head flight attendant on United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767 that was flown into the center’s south tower.

“When I gathered my thoughts, I was thinking that it was about time,” Yancey said. “Justice did prevail after all.”

LaBorie was a 1975 graduate of Mitchell High School who attended the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and graduated from the University of Denver. Yancey said she was “feisty” and that she must have struggled with the terrorists as the plane was hijacked.

Yancey said he’d feared kidney disease might claim bin Laden before the United States could deliver a measure of justice, so he’s happy that Navy Seals fought bin Laden face to face.

“I’m glad he saw them and knew it was the end for him,” Yancey said. “If he had been hit by a bomb, he wouldn’t have known anything.”

Still, he said, bin Laden’s death reopens old wounds.

“It gives me some relief, but there’s no closure for my daughter,” he said. “It just brings up more memories …images of the second tower that her plane went into.”

The Bells also went through a roller coaster of fond memories and renewed grief.

A track star at Doherty High School, Nina Bell moved after college to Connecticut, then Manhattan.

“She was so adventurous, so bright,” her mother said. “She just had a beautiful outlook on life.”

Nina Bell, 39, was just four days into a new job at an insurance brokerage firm on the 96th floor of the north tower when the first plane struck.

“I had talked to her a few days before,” her mother said. “She was so excited about starting her new job.”

The Bells went to New York  later to have a quiet memorial with friends at one of their daughter’s favorite spots in Central Park, then flew home with her Yorkshire terrier, Mere-Mere.

As the ramifications of the 9/11 attacks have continued for almost a decade, Nina Bell’s memory has shaped her parents’ reactions.

Sunday, when an image of bin Laden came on, Pat Bell stared in disbelief.

“I couldn’t believe he was really dead,” she said.

Then the smoking towers flashed on the screen and Lowell Bell had to look away. Too many memories.

He felt a glint of satisfaction over bin Laden’s death, but nothing could stanch the flood of feelings.

Pat Bell, too, felt a small sense of comfort, but no jolt of relief or vindication.

“It is sort of anticlimactic,” she said. “For us his death doesn’t change anything. Nothing can change what happened. It doesn’t bring her back. It may not even change anything in the wider political sense.”

It was the same reaction she had when the U.S. invaded first Afghanistan and then Iraq, she said.

“I can understand the anger, the urge to retaliate,” she said. “But for me, the wars don’t resolve anything. We’ve lost I don’t know how many lives in these 10 years, and some people say it is worth it. For me it is not.”

Instead of focusing on a legacy of retribution, the Bells have created the Nina P. Bell Memorial Scholarship. Set up in 2002, it gives one female minority student from Colorado Springs School District 11 tuition for a Colorado public college each year.

“We want to find the funding to expand it to hopefully include more women and all four years,” Bell’s father said. “The fight continues.”

Nina Bell, left, and Kathryn Yancey LaBorie died on Sept. 11, 2001. Photo by